


nobody can compare to the way you get down

by aleyara



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Muggle, F/M, James is nervous, and marlene is a good friend, lily is a lawyer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:29:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25611334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aleyara/pseuds/aleyara
Summary: Marlene gifts Lily with a pair of red heels for her birthday, and it all goes south from there.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 30





	nobody can compare to the way you get down

Marlene buys Lily a pair of shiny, cherry red heels for her 25th. She tells her, over red wine and a tub of ice cream, that it’s about time Lily had cause to wear something like that. Lily rolls her eyes, snorts, eyes her pair of sensible work shoes by the door where she shook them off last night, and tucks her feet back under the blanket.

It’s not as though her barrister’s position affords many opportunities for that sort of thing. She doubts her clientele, consisting largely of middle-aged men who scrunch their foreheads when they realise she is their barrister and not the assistant, would stop to appreciate her footwear.

She is grateful for the gift, doubtless, but it’s the not-so-underlying comment that accompanies it that she rejects. Marlene has been on her case about getting back out there since she broke it off with her last boyfriend nearly a year ago, and it’s well-meant, but Lily’s hardly about to strut into a club and lock lips with the first man she sees.

She has a life! She has a career!

Netflix asked her whether she was still watching three times last night.

 _They’re down-to-fuck heels_ , she protests to Marlene at 1 am.

 _yeah thats the point_ is Marlene’s reply.

* * *

The morning brings with it a hangover. Potter waves hi to her on the tube, far more cheery and friendly than she has ever given him cause to be. It irritates her as she nods her head to him in reply. She thinks of the photo that had rolled onto her feed when she was scrolling through Instagram last night, his eyes and smile bright, a drunken Sirius Black leaning on his shoulder, the pair of them backlit by the neon sign of the club they had been in.

At work Dorcas floats in, chatting to Mary about the party she’s going to over the weekend, and Lily feels sharp frustration like a poke in the ribs.

She comes home and starts herself a bath, since the tub in her apartment is a luxury she doesn’t avail herself of often enough (though the heating has been broken for long enough to almost negate that luxury), digging out and lighting a scented candle out of that kitchen drawer that hasn’t been touched since she first moved in and chucked all her junk into it. She gets out of the bath warm and clean, but no less agitated. _Oh well_ , she thinks to herself as she makes her way to her sofa, _Suppose it’s just another Netflix and ice cream sort of night._ She’s been having a lot of those lately.

From her sofa she can see the entryway, can see the red heels, garish in the soft, warm light of her apartment, winking at her.

 _Oh_ , she thinks, and curses.

* * *

_This will end badly._

The red on her lips are the same shade as her heels, and her dress is black and clinging. Lily thinks about how much Tuney would have to say about all this, and in the end, that’s the thought that pushes her out the door.

Fuck it. She looks good, and it’s about time she’s had cause to.

* * *

The club is loud and thrumming like a living creature, and Lily regrets it immediately.

The neon red sign outside the door proclaims it to be the same bar as the one on Potter’s Instagram. _At least the floors aren’t (that) sticky._ She walks stiffly to the bar and downs a drink before she can lose her nerve. And then another, and another, and another.

Things, as they are wont to do when preceded by innumerable shots of tequila, get a little fuzzy after that.

She remembers dancing, when she loosens up enough to feel like a part of the buzzing, technicolour hive that makes up the rest of the club. In the flares of multicoloured light over the dance floor, a girl in red heels with her hands in the air is an archetype, a part of the scene, and it feels good not to have people scrunch their foreheads at her, to have a drunk lady in sparkly eyeshadow compliment her hair and enthusiastically offer her a bag of peanuts.

Later in the night, when she drags a stranger out the door and into a taxi by the collar of his jacket, she supposes that is archetypal too.

* * *

She could not possibly regret it all more when she wakes up in the morning and sees who, exactly, the fit bloke with the stretchable jacket collar in her bed is.

She makes a mental note to donate Marlene’s entire shoe closet to charity, because in her bed when she gets woken up by the insistent sunlight at her window and rolls over, is James Fleabag Potter.

Potter blinks awake while she is still staring at him in horror, and smiles up at her all goofily before –

“Oh,” he says, “no.”

* * *

“Look, I don’t know what you think but I didn’t actually scheme to end up in your bed last night,” he says as he shuffles into his clothes.

Lily is wrapped up in a bathrobe with her arms crossed over her chest, and steadfastly refuses to look at him. This is the whole reason why she doesn’t do this sort of thing. It would be just like her to go clubbing one night in down-to-fuck heels and come home with the prick of a boy who had tormented her all through school and who she secretly thought was unfairly fit all along but didn’t realise she did until he moved into her neighbourhood three years ago as a reformed arsehole and apologised and wished her a good morning every single day on the _goddamned tube_.

Potter’s face is flushed but shuttered as he finger-combs his hair and straightens his glasses. “I’ll just… I’ll just go, then. See you around, yeah?” He cringes and, when she doesn’t respond, whispers something under his breath and makes for the door.

It’s a Saturday morning, and she’s standing in her bedroom in a bathrobe watching James Fleaface Potter shuffle out of her apartment and,

“Wait.”

* * *

Lily hasn’t hooked up with anyone in a while, but even if she had, she doesn’t imagine making breakfast with your hook-up gets any less awkward the nth time around.

They bump into each other and spill milk and drop spoons until she finally snaps at him, harsher than she intended, to just sit at the counter and let her make the food.

Every clatter of kitchenware and shuffle of boxes and drone of the coffee machine seems impossibly louder than ever before until, true to form, he makes a stupid pun about the spilt milk and she… laughs. She laughs because he’s staring at her expectantly with his wide sunshine smile and she’s seen him on the tube every weekday morning for the last two years and never managed to ignore how fucking fit he is and last night the heating was still broken but she had woken up warm and cosy and self-satisfied. She laughs because the joke is stupid and bad and she wants to laugh at it.

Potter’s grin spreads wider, and he runs his hands through his hopelessly messy hair. A nervous gesture, she’s beginning to understand.

 _Fuck you_ , she thinks to Marlene in her apartment on the other side of town as she smiles back.

* * *

Her phone pings at work the next day, and there waiting for her when she turns it on is a message from a number that’s lain dormant in her phone for three years.

_evans, you have shit taste in coffee. how you swallow it down, i don’t know_

She considers not replying, then considers making him wait for a reply, then types, _I drink it for sustenance, not to savour its taste, you tosser_

 _you’ve been doing it all blasphemously wrong then_ , he replies instantly. _you need an education in the delicate art of coffee._

 _Is this how you ask out all the other girls, Potter_? she types, and pretends that this kind of boldness isn’t a half-forgotten thing from her schooldays. The common denominator there, she muses, is Potter.

 _james_ , he corrects.

Her fingers hover over the keys for a moment. _Lily._

* * *

Lily walks into Marlene’s apartment a week after that Saturday and twenty-five minutes after James presses an unnecessarily expensive cup of coffee from the pretty café around the corner into her hands. She plops down onto the sofa in front of the TV and, instead of telling Marlene the events of the night forthwith, starts on a tirade about how there is a reason she doesn’t indulge in down-to-fuck heels or nights out at the club.

Marlene, who taught Lily how to do a smoky eye when they were 16 and she was sneaking out to a party for the first time, passes her the brownies Alice dropped off the day before, eyes the hickey under Lily’s ear covered partially by her hair, and rolls her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from The Lucky Ones by Lana del Rey, which is a song that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this fic or the characters of Lily and James.


End file.
